Positron

First, A Caveat

• Most material in these slides is borrowed shamelessly from the Positron presentations for the 2024 Posit conference

What is Positron?

• Positron is a next-generation data science IDE (as opposed to software engineer IDE)
  • Code-first mentality
  • A polyglot IDE where you can do all your data science (currently support for just R and Python)
  • Most IDEs out there built primarily for just one language (i.e. RStudio, Spyder, MATLAB)
  • Uses languages as ‘language packs’ on the backend - highly extensible

Why Positron?

• You can use more than one language easily and seamlessly
• Extensible and familiar
• Design inspired by RStudio
• Fundamentals based on OpenOSS - the open-source foundation of VSCode

What does it look like?

What does it look like?

What does it look like?

How does it work? Extensibility

• Extensibility: languages are not ‘baked in’ - they come as ‘language ’packs’
• Programming languages communicate through an API with the IDE
• Switch between languages and language versions easily in same session using the interpreter selector

How Does it Work? Next-Gen Data Explorer

• Poitron has a next-generation data explorer built in

What does it look like? Next-Gen Data Explorer

What does it look like? Advanced Filtering in Data Explorer

Why a New IDE Rather Than Enhancing RStudio?

• RStudio is a two-process system

• Everything in the main RStudio window is one process that runs R, saves files, generating plots, everything else

  • This is why RStudio bogs down when big R processes running

• Outside the main RStudio window is Electron, the chrome ‘frame’ around RStudio

Why a New IDE Rather Than Enhancing RStudio?

Advantage of a Whole New IDE

• Positron is a fork of CodeOSS, the open source foundation for VSCode

• Taking CodeOSS Foundation and tooling it out for Data Science

  • Great data explorer

  • Environment selections

  • Plot and visualization panes

Advantage of a Whole New IDE

• In Positron, R and Python are extensions the communicate with Positron through it’s API

• In RStudio, the IDE is itself part of the R process, so you get this:

How Positron Works as a Polyglot IDE

How Positron Works as a Polyglot IDE

Extensions - Lots of Them!

Extensions - Git in Positron